September 4, 2012

Dan O’Brien: “The Poet and the War Reporter Paul Watson Go For a Sled Ride”

This week we’re featuring a poem from our brand-new newspaper-man summer issue, 35.2. Dan O’Brien’s poetry and fiction have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. His play about war reporter Paul Watson, The Body of an American, is the winner of the 2011 L. Arnold Weissberger Award and will premiere at Portland Center Stage in 2012. He holds a B.A. in English & Theatre from Middlebury College, and a Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting & Fiction from Brown University. Dan has served as a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, the inaugural Djerassi Fellow in Playwriting at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and twice as the Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-residence at Sewanee. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, writer and actor Jessica St. Clair.

Author’s Note:

These poems come from a collection called, not surprisingly, The War Reporter. Five years ago I began corresponding with Paul Watson, a journalist most well-known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a fallen American soldier in the streets of Mogadishu in 1993. When Paul took that picture he claims he heard the dead man speak to him: “If you do this, I will own you forever.” The purpose of my work with Paul has been to try to use poetry to bridge the distance between an “average” person like myself, and someone who has witnessed some of the signal atrocities of our era, in places as far-flung as Angola, Kosovo, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan (the list goes on). The poems are derived from his memoir, Where War Lives, his journalism, recordings and transcripts he has shared with me, and most valuably our emails and conversations. Some of these poems take place in Ulukhaktok in the Canadian High Arctic, where I visited Paul there in the winter of 2010 while he was enjoying a brief respite from war reporting, covering the “Arctic and Aboriginal Beat” for the Toronto Star. He’s now based mainly in Kandahar. Our peculiar collaboration has also produced a play, The Body of an American, but after finishing the play I found I couldn’t let his story go. In a very personal way, his voice continues to haunt me.

The Poet and the War Reporter Paul Watson Go For a Sled Ride

Outside, the Inuit hunter’s beating

their muzzles with a stick. All tangled up

in frozen cord howling. A savage race

of idiot wolves. I sit like a raja

on a blue plastic tarp, my rubber boots

splayed above the ice above the sea with

the hunter’s mouth behind my ear barking,

Gee! Gee! Zaw! The war reporter’s clinging

to the skidoo driver’s sides, red tail lights

swerving in a whorl of snow. You feel it

in your spine, your neck, your skull, the grinding

of the rusted runners on ice crystals

like sand. Cresting invisible hillocks,

the dogs fan out to shit in streaks. We stop

where the ice runs out. The Arctic Ocean

like an undulating eternity

of inky slush a few feet off. Seal heads

popping the newborn crust, their spectral eyes

on us. My feet are numb. My tailbone is

bruised, Dan. Dan, put your weight on this anchor,

says the hunter. Wait here while I go drain

my dragon. While the war reporter shoots

the skidoo driver discussing global

warming as fat flakes hover and the dogs

are murderous. The steel anchor’s a claw

in the ice, tethered tautly to the cord

tethered to the craziest dog. One time

I was trying to put my oinikhiot

in the water? after I’d hunted me

a seal? And my foot slipped in the ocean.

It’s real dangerous, man.Real dangerous. The sled

is escaping backwards, I’m laughing like

I’m ashamed, dogs rejoicing as my boot

slips off the anchor as the anchor slips

out of the ice and suddenly I see

the world as if from above. Hey Dan—Dan

are you okay? Because the anchor’s wrapped

around my ankle and whipped me up off

my feet. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry

I almost got you killed. But Paul I was

rejoicing, rejoicing as the seals ducked

back under the new ice.

About Austin Segrest

Austin Segrest’s poetry has appeared in TriQuarterly, The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, Ploughshares, and New England Review. He is a PhD student in the creative writing program at the University of Missouri, and the poetry editor of The Missouri Review.